[xiaoma]

>"Second, even a very intense 12 week course is a good start, but I don't know how many employers are going to hire someone with 3 months training."

I graduated from Hack Reactor this April, the only school I know of a with similar number of instruction hours to those quoted here—about 800. Back then, the school had little brand, but I still got hired by Groupon, and not in a junior role. I was a liberal arts major.

Since that time, I've seen demand for students of later cohorts grow and grow. Some have gotten into white hot start-ups like famo.us, Google and Yahoo! offered interviews to practically the entire current graduating class. One of my friends who started right after me is leading Keychain Logistic's front-end development (YC2012). More interestingly is that while we learn Node, Meteor, Backbone and a lot of other JS-related technologies, a large number of formerly non-technical students have gone on to take roles that have little to do with JavaScript. A couple of examples I can think of off the top of my head are senior Java developer at Pandora and chief data scientist at Node Prime. I really can't emphasize strongly enough what 800 hours in 12 weeks can do in the right program.

My biggest concern with what I can see of the Omaha Code School is actually the low price tag. These schools are not commodities with roughly similar pros and cons. There is a huge variance in outcomes and if you're going to put your life on hold for months while spending all your waking time investing in a new career, it would be madness not to invest in the highest quality program you can.

[Edmond]

From your github stuff it seems you've been programming for much longer than a few months?...From novice to pro in 12 weeks...not likely.

[xiaoma]

I was a novice, but not a total beginner. I knew what variables, loops and functions were, but didn't know about the chrome debugger or have a good grasp on client-server programming. I had been trying and failing to get a junior front-end role for several months after transitioning from a career in foreign language education. Hack Reactor was literally life changing for me.

My friend Howard, a high school drop-out from London, came into class with virtually no programming background at all. Here's his github https://github.com/cheeseen. He contracts for Google labs now. Like the school in the post HR now has a pre-course curriculum (with online help) to get people up to the point where they can make a simple chat app before the first day of class, so students get a bit further than my class did.

It really saddens me to see such negative default assumptions, but if you're that skeptical, you can look through every single graduate of the program up through class 3, their LinkedIn profiles and their github profiles here: http://www.hackreactor.com/engineers/. You really can't find that level of transparency from any other school I know of.